CircleID: P2Phttp://www.circleid.com/topics/
Latest P2P related postings on CircleIDenCopyright 2018, unless where otherwise noted.2018-03-19T10:08:01-08:00CircleID13045http://www.circleid.com/images/logo_rss.gifhttp://www.circleid.com/
2050: The Internet Odyssey - How We Lost It and a Way to Get It Backhttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20140508_2050_the_internet_odyssey_how_we_lost_it_and_a_way_to_get_it_back/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140508_2050_the_internet_odyssey_how_we_lost_it_and_a_way_to_get_it_back/
The Internet was replaced by a dual system created in 2014: a fiber optic network called "Net2Cash". It has a speed of one hundred Petabits per second (equivalent to 100 million Gigabits per second or 100,000 million Megabits per second). We no longer talk about Megabytes or Gigabytes because that is old school. Nowadays a couple of Exabites store the content of all written by man, from books and newspapers to Sumerian clay tablets; from Inca quipus and Egyptian hieroglyphs to all homework made by kids registered in elementary school. All written or recorded material stored in just two Exabites. All big cities are connected with fiber to home since many years ago. That was the job done by the only three worldwide megacarriers with the help of central governments. We pay the price to get it at home so we must be the owners of our fiber network but it belongs to the megacarriers no matter if we pay during decades, month by month. We were told it was a pay for the content not for the fiber installation or property. The fiber optic network can transmit thousands of channels of what was called television and radio; millions of movies are shown at the same time for all kind of global users. Billions of personal conversations are transported too in a service that replaced the outdated phone system. All simultaneously. For practical purposes its carrying capacity is infinite.

The Improved Net – Just for the Rich

"Net2Cash" is based on an automatic payment system which deducts all expenses from our master account in the global banking unified system. All residents of large cities have an account because we are automatically registered at birth. This single account manages all our revenue and expenses throughout our whole lives. Using other means is a punishable offense; it goes against the established system and is forbidden across the globe. My account is deducted daily for all kind of public services I consume: water, electricity, gas mileage, tickets for transportation and toll payments to use the physical or the neural highway (formerly called "digital highway" or "information highway"). Licenses for bikes, motorcycles, personal cars, small boats and planes are also paid automatically. Since ten years ago we all pay a fee for air consumption. It is used to cover the expenditures made to maintain a clean and healthy air in the big cities. Global positioning systems, still based on satellite tracking, locate immediately any individual, any vehicle, any computer, tablet or cell phone that is registered in the system. Costs to access public information are also automatically collected: libraries, museums, documents on universities and research institutes, all are included. No protest since the last two generations were born under the neural network and they know that "Net2Cash" network is the only permitted communication tool in large cities. Any other way of interfacing was banned because it was polluting the environment or it was used to hack and did not respect copyrights. Worse case is that some free Wi-Fi systems were used for subversive purposes and anti-system protests. Today the wireless channels are used for the localization network and to have full access and control of the personal economy and the whereabouts of individuals and devices. All this is made thinking on the common good for all people.

Here, in the Neural Network, all services are allowed to be charged, the same with the access speed (from 1 Gigabit to 100 Terabits) and content type (video premiere is charged at a higher price than the later releases). Films are also charged according to the circuit system rotation, a system that already is more than 150 years old. Price is different if the movie is seen on a cellphone, a tablet, or we use the new acceleration system that comes with the inserted nanochip we all have from birth. This chip allows us to view the film without external devices. Hence the name "neural network". But everything has its price. It is natural.

The neural network has been designed to provide efficient services and charge for them. Income earned in "Net2Cash" is spread over some hundred mega companies. These are the content providers that work only on this network. Wireless networks were banned ten years ago on the grounds that they were out of control and facilitated crimes, piracy and unauthorized use of services that are fully and legally provided by the fiber optic network. Unfair competence they call it and closed all free wireless networks. Governments, which never allowed the free use of wireless frequencies, claimed all that were previously assigned. We were told they were prone to lack of system control and tools for social disorder. Finally pirated books and movies are out of the government revenue system and do not pay taxes.

What Happened to the Old Internet

The Internet as was originally known is gone. Gone are televisions, radios, cinema, theater or concerts. Everything is transmitted directly to the receiving unit that the person has at hand. All costs are deducted from the overall account. "Net2Cash" is a free fiber optic network that is paid as much as you use it. Of course its cost is deducted from the overall master account of each person. Yet you have to pay for all information received, all must be paid, including private videos, from individual to individual… if they are sent by the network they pay a transportation fee. The worldwide mega-carriers are only three. Presidents and top level government officials directly manage the issues that matter to governments with the CEOs of the mega-carriers. This infrastructure companies became, more than four decades ago, from highway builders to content providers, then to content provider watchers, then to guardian watchers of all kind of the packets that are carried by the network: if something happens without their control they are accountable to governments. It is the price they were eager to pay to differentiate Net2Cash from the old and "too-unmanageable" Internet.

The "charged by your access speed" system began over forty years ago when some big carriers in North America started to charge for transmission speed in what was called the "kilobits" race: 64k, 128k , 256k, etc. And no one complained. Then the collection mechanism was 'improved' with the emergence of the mobil Internet and the smartphones: people were charged for "megabyte "of transmitted information. Soon the "good idea" prospered and was replicated by virtually all worldwide companies that provided access to the Internet. Free market, fair competition, social development or technological… no cause was heard: toll bridge rights on the Internet were firmly established. I build a bridge over a river and collect different if you spend walking or running (speed rate toll) and I will charge different if you pass walking with a small pack in your hands or with a cart full of packages (amount of information transported). If you transport one kilo of potatoes you will pay different than when you pass with one kilo of diamonds, or one kilo of books… you will pay different (content payment).

This is the information and entertainment highway for rich people and all kind of wannabees. Gone are concepts such as free pass for all humans on the roads and highways. This is a cultural heritage from when companies, under the guise of free market and the inability of governments to meet public services, got rights to ask a price for water, electricity, roads, air, highways. The new feudal lords re-installed the old and very lucrative "tolls".

The Net for the Poor

There is another parallel world located outside of the big cities. It is located generally in rural villages around the planet: there lays the remains of the old Internet. Using free wireless technologies, this people, who rebelled against the system, mount micro portable antennas, nail sized, that emit signal for a few seconds and then turn off automatically. They do this to avoid triangulation that was used to detect the location of unauthorized broadcasters. They use a system derived from the old "torrent" protocol or "peer to peer protocol". This P2P protocol has been transformed ant it no longer transport just books and movies but it carries all kind of packets (the base of the old and good TCP/IP system). The TCP/IP packets are transmitted between "peers", no "tiers" exist because that was the root of all evils: in this Internet all are peers as it was in the beginning of the Internet. These packets carry any kind of information (personal email, web browsing, video sharing, tv, radio and phone systems… all are included and possible). Packets are relayed from user to user, from peer to peer, as it was on the origins of the Internet. A BGP efficiency routing protocol was revived, put on steroids, to optimize the system.

In order of avoiding extreme nationalism excuses that were used to grab control of the net, users located all around the planet have got global denominations based in a number system. For example all people in my region use the domain ".323" that means "Planet Earth" (since the first number, "3"); then the second number, "1", means "European Continent", and the last digit "3" means the region where I am located. No ISO table was chosen to represent countries or regions because we saw from history how governments use this fact to claim rights over the local internet resources (ip numbers and domain names) assigned to the regional users and not to any form of established political power.

In this secondary world there are no Internet access providers (formerly called ISPs) because all users got Ipv6 numbers and they can mount and offer any service without the need to pay to any mega company. All are users and all have the opportunity to be providers, carriers, or service providers in any moment. It is their right and the capacity they got when Ipv6 was globally established. They transport the packets at the same speed, no filtering of packets, no big brother control. It is a mess or a mesh? Hell or paradise? But it is up to you.

The Come Back to the Beginning: Peer Networking

The original system, inherited from the original Internet, is known as P2PN (Peer to Peer Network). Lately it was updated with some down to earth solutions taken from Africa (the sneakernet) and Colombia (the biblioburro).

When no relay points are available in a remote village, they use a system of people traveling from town to town carrying complete collections of books, videos , movies, and documents of all kinds, recorded in the nano devices called "Pico-Neurals". These replaced the USBs, SD cards and similar devices.

The "Pico-Neurals" are built emulating the human brain: on a nurturing housing mass, electrons are stored and sorted in a particular way that represents the information you want to keep. Its storage capacity is close to infinite. That's why they were banned and rejected for use on the fiber optic network: a single "Pico-Neural" has all the information that a person can consume in lifetime: They were called unmanageable, not profitable and not monetizable. The Peer2Peer Network plus the Pico-Neurals do not permit information be metered trickle delivered.

All these elements are inexpensive and easily available. The problem is transportation. Only a fiber optic network could carry all the information of a "Pico-Neural" device to the next relay or storage point. And fiber optic transport is controlled: you have to pay to have it installed, you have to pay for maintenance and you are fully registered. Of course you must pay a daily fee for all that is received and sent over the fiber optic network, even your daily family conversations with your kids. Storage capacity is infinite and all recorded data can be searched by the megacarriers and governments. That is the reason why the "Pico-Neurals" are used based on peer to peer networking. We do not like to use the "Pico-Neurals" on the mega-carrier optic fiber networks because all our information is sold by lots and used as a trade card with governments in a "quid pro quo" fashion.

Digital Divide Forever

Practically this segregation of two worlds, two cultures, has recreated the American slave society in force until the sixties mixed with the surveillance society from the Far East where emperors and military leaders were worshiped and with the centralized regimens in the frigid steppes that assign block commissioners who monitor everything that happens with their neighbors and report to a central power. The very same that happened with some tropical governments that conquered power more than 100 years ago. All these, together, have been surpassed by this new apartheid system.

Today, these two worlds are different: first the "Net2Cash" were you pay as you go, keep walking around and consuming more. Water and air you have to consume, necessarily. And you have to pay for them. Information, entertainment, communication… you have to consume too! And you have to pay. On the other hand, the surviving network, the "Pico-Neural", is free, but has limitations and problems: only exists in rural areas far from big cities and is allowed in small towns that are not of economic interest to central governments.

Those born in the year 2050 have no choice. If you are born in a big city then you are from the very first moment in the "Net2Cash" system. If you are born in the rural sector, as a any children hardened by poverty and hard circumstances, you will have to learn to cut firewood, purify your water, install your portable antennas for the "Pico- Neural " network Internet , manage mobile nodes in the "Peer to Peer Network" and been non accountable for the mainstream society. Governments and megacarriers are fighting strongly against the isolated groups trying to stabilize networks the "Pico- Neural" in the large cities. There dissidents are segregated by gender, income level, race, beliefs, and his stubbornness to use unauthorized networks. To return them to the fold the governments and the mega carriers make special promotions for these groups: discounts, a full shopping package and equipment at discounted prices. The objective is to get them as part of the system and drown its disruptive behavior.

The Message

We are relaying this message to the year 2014. It is done thanks to the technology of spatial temporal transport. That was the year where "Net2Cash" was created and the old Internet were put in shackles and anchored in time. If you can do something to change the law of exclusion within the transport networks of information, known to you as the breakdown of net neutrality, please do it today. Whether you belong to the public or private sector, if you can envision and foresee what will happen, do something today. Otherwise your children and grandchildren will live with the new apartheid system that has been implemented throughout the world.

This is a message for the children of freedom, the descendants of Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine… come together with the sons of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy.. all together with the heirs of Gandhi, San Martín, Bolivar and Tupac Amaru… with the support of every human being who wants to live in a free society… decide, once again, to throw out the English tea. Today. Tell the FCC and Tom Wheeler they shall not pass.

"I'll send an SOS to the world ...
Seems I'm not alone ... at being alone
A hundred billion castaways
Looking for a home ..."
Message in a bottle. The Police, September 1979

]]>2014-05-08T17:59:00-08:00internetaccess_providersbroadbandinternet_governancenet_neutralityp2ppolicy_regulationprivacyIETF 85 Begins Next Week In Atlanta - Here Is How To Follow Alonghttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20121102_ietf_85_begins_next_week_in_atlanta_here_is_how_to_follow_along/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20121102_ietf_85_begins_next_week_in_atlanta_here_is_how_to_follow_along/
The 85th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) begins next week in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Over 1000 engineers, maybe as many as 1400 or more, from all around the world will gather in various working groups to discuss and debate issues relating to the open standards that define the Internet's infrastructure. Much of the IETF standards work happens within mailing lists and through submitted "Internet-Draft" documents, but these face-to-face meetings that occur three times each year provide an opportunity for rapid discussion of contentious issues and for bringing people together to move work forward.

As is always the case, the IETF meeting will feature groups focusing on pretty much all the various technical aspects of Internet infrastructure: IPv6, DNS, DHCP, security, VoIP, SIP, WebRTC, routing, "Internet of Things", P2P, HTTP, TCP, video conferencing, congestion control, energy management… basically pick any Internet protocol acronym and you'll probably find some group there talking about the topic. If you just scan down the IETF 85 agenda, you will get a sense of the breadth of topics being covered.

If you can't get to Atlanta next week to participate face-to-face, the good news is that the IETF provides a variety of ways that you can participate remotely in the meetings. I recently wrote up instructions that you may find useful: How To Participate In IETF 85 Remotely.

Out of this meeting, new standards will emerge, new drafts will be created, new efforts will be started… and the multistakeholder open standards process that drives the Internet will continue. If you get a chance, the IETF meetings are open to anyone to attend — and anyone can also follow along remotely.

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and on staff of Internet Society

]]>2012-11-02T08:56:01-08:00internetcybersecuritydnsinternet_governanceinternet_protocolip_addressingipv6p2pvoipEuropean Court of Justice: Courts in EU May Not Order ISPs to Filter Out P2Phttp://www.circleid.com/posts/european_court_of_justice_courts_in_eu_may_not_order_isps_to_filter_out_p2p/http://www.circleid.com/posts/european_court_of_justice_courts_in_eu_may_not_order_isps_to_filter_out_p2p/
The European Court of Justice has ruled that content owners cannot ask ISPs to filter out illegal content. The ruling could have implications for the creative industries as they attempt to crack down on piracy. The court said that while content providers can ask ISPs to block specific sites, wider filtering was in breach of the E-Commerce Directive.

]]>2011-11-24T09:32:00-08:00internetaccess_providerscensorshipinternet_governancelawp2ppolicy_regulationSkype Now Officially Part of Microsofthttp://www.circleid.com/posts/skype_now_officially_part_of_microsoft/http://www.circleid.com/posts/skype_now_officially_part_of_microsoft/
Microsoft formally announced the closure of its acquisition of Skype originally announced on May 10, 2011. Microsoft and Skype have declared to remain focused "on their shared goal of connecting all people across all devices and accelerating both companies' efforts to transform real-time communications for consumers and enterprise customers."

The following inforgraphic was released as part of the announcement presenting current stats on Skype usage.

]]>2011-10-14T09:24:00-08:00internetp2ptelecomvoipThe Ugly End of the Phone Networkhttp://www.circleid.com/posts/the_ugly_end_of_the_phone_network/http://www.circleid.com/posts/the_ugly_end_of_the_phone_network/
I was a little early. "By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country, I blogged just after Obama had been elected. Before that I'd prophesized the end of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) by 2010. Nevertheless, the end is nigh. And it's gonna be ugly without some planning.

The problem is more social and economic than technical. A whole web of subsidies and special services assured that everyone had access to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), which is still a regulated service. The cost of the subsidies — the universal service fund (USF) subsidy for rural service, for example — is spread over the whole customer base for traditional telephony, which used to be pretty much everybody. Regulated carriers are required to provide special equipment and services for the hearing impaired and others. Lifeline (basic) service is subsidized by more affluent telephone customers for those who are less affluent. Telephone customers pay for 911 service through their monthly bills. Regulated carriers are required to report significant outages and state public utility commissions regulate their quality of service.

However more and more people are getting their telecommunications from unregulated providers. Cellular service is somewhat regulated on a national basis but not at all at the state level. Cellular providers contribute less to the subsidies than landline providers because cell phones were initially considered an addition to rather than a substitute for landline service. Some VoIP providers contribute nothing to the subsidy pools, especially when they are not charging their customers for calls within their network (Skype, for example). Other VoIP providers like Vonage have agreed that they are essentially a PSTN replacement and, because they interconnect with the PSTN for almost every call, they do collect from their customers to support the various subsidies. The FCC has asserted jurisdiction over services which interconnect with the PSTN. States are considering how much jurisdiction they have over nonPSTN providers connected to the PSTN.

But what happens when there is no PSTN with which to interconnect? What basis is there for regulation? Whom do fees for subsidies get collected from? What if there's a major outage? Who has jurisdiction? That day is coming so these questions can't be avoided and they're tough. Should people who use services like Skype to make free calls have to pay a subsidy so that people who don't or can't use Skype can afford to make paid calls? Even if we wanted to require this in the US, what's to stop a new Estonian networking company from providing call connection services to US users via the Internet, especially if it's not charging for the service? Who is responsible for poor call quality during an emergency: Vonage which doesn't control the physical network or the ISP who doesn't control the Vonage servers or the end user software?

The problem of rural areas is particularly acute. The telephone network, like the electric grid, came later in rural areas than in the areas where the economics were more compelling. The electrical and phone network would have taken even more time than they did to reach rural America were it not for government-enforced cross-subsidies and a requirement that regulated monopoly carriers serve everyone in their area regardless of cost of service. This requirement wasn't a problem for the monopolies because they knew that they could charge well-above actual cost in urban areas and use that surplus for the more expensive areas. Regulators encouraged this socialization of cost; it's a lot like what the Post Office does. You can make a strong argument that universal access to service makes a whole nation strong — as good roads do — so that cross-subsidies are perfectly proper.

But we demonopolized, imperfectly and unevenly and incompletely; but we did. The result was a flood of innovation including cellular services (the old companies had to buy their way back into cellular) and the Internet. The result is much, much cheaper communication of all kinds. But we have a problem, Houston.

Without regulated geographic monopolies there's no good way to get the cheap-to-serve areas to subsidize service in the expensive areas. Verizon, for example, sold off its landline business in northern New England to FairPoint so Verizon could concentrate its capital on more lucrative fiber service in more populated areas. Not long after, FairPoint went bankrupt as landline defections increased and capital needs proved greater than anticipated. Even now that it has emerged from bankruptcy without the burden of the debt it took on to buy the assets from Verizon, it's still not clear that there's a path to profitability as landline losses to cellular, cable, and VoIP continue to mount. Verizon's earnings from fiber and cell service are no longer available to subsidize our landline services in Vermont.

It's easy to envision a future — it's almost here — when nobody is using copper landlines for plain old voice services except those rural pockets where both the erecting of poles and the original provision of telephone service was subsidized and where telephone service is still being subsidized today. People in these areas are stuck using POTS for the same reason that they needed a subsidy to get POTS in the first place: it isn't economical to provide cable or cellular or broadband services where the population is thin. The early money goes into areas with a better payoff (reasonably). Not only is there no cross-subsidy to assure buildout of broadband or cellular alternatives to POTS in rural areas; there is also a huge threat to the existing subsidies for rural POTs. These subsidies are collected from other users of POTS; if we country people are the only remaining users of POTS, where's the subsidy going to come from? We can't move forward to the brave new telecommunication world and we can't stay where we are!

]]>2011-05-13T09:23:00-08:00internetaccess_providersbroadbandp2ptelecomvoipThe End of the "Skype as Bandit" Erahttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20110510_the_end_of_the_skype_as_bandit_era/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20110510_the_end_of_the_skype_as_bandit_era/
And so it ends… Skype was always always a fun company to write about because they were always a bit of a rogue. The scrappy little startup that took on the megacorps of the telecom industry… and won in so many ways… look at their leading % of international calls… or the fact that per-minute call costs are now very clearly being commoditized down to zero…

... a company from Estonia of all places, which pre-Skype most of us could only vaguely put on a map but now many of us know more about, including that fact that many Estonians have multiple vowels together in their names in ways we don't in English (ex. "Jaanus" and "Liive")…

... a product that was given away for free across multiple operating systems (even if some of us whined about the lack of attention to our chosen platform)…

... a service that just went ahead and implemented SRTP and encrypted call control when all the major telcos were whining about why they couldn't secure calls over IP because of the demands, latency, blah, blah, blah…

... a product that gave most all of us the first experience we ever had with wideband audio — where it felt like you were right there with the other person… and in fact, many of us found we could record podcasts over Skype (even using video)…

... a product that truly offered a multi-modal/multi-channel user experience… and raised the bar for all the enterprise products that were trying to deliver "Unified Communications" ... Skype was offering the "UC" experience before "UC was even coined as a term…

... a product that became a verb… "just skype me"…

... and a product that had enough of a sense of humor — and roguishness — to implement emoticons like these:

banghead)
(bandit)
(moon)
(finger)

(Tip: Don't type the last two in a chat window where people might be offended… and methinks the first one might come in VERY handy with meetings between Skypers and their new masters. :-) )

I started using Skype back in 2004 or so when it was still very early days. In 2005 I started using it to record the Blue Box podcast and to contribute to the For Immediate Release podcast. I was at Mitel in those days in the product management team and I remember back then talking to my peers about how Skype "just worked" through firewalls and how the wideband audio was outstanding.

Since that time, Skype has become part of the DNA of my personal IT infrastructure… I use it extensively for my own communication… and I use it very extensively within Voxeo where it is our Unified Communications tool of choice right now (for reasons I wrote about before). If there's one tool that's always open on my computers, it is Skype.

And Skype is probably the one company/product/service I've written about the MOST on Disruptive Telephony blog since I launched the blog back at the beginning of 2006. Largely because Skype has been one of the single most disruptive influences on our industry. Sure, many of my posts have been critical, particularly of the new Skype 5.0 for Mac, but they have been critical out of my passion for the product — and of wanting it to be so much better.

... you are no longer fighting "against THE MAN”… you now are "THE MAN"! It's hard to get much bigger of a megacorp than Microsoft!

I do actually think the acquisition is good for Skype in a number of ways:

Financial stability – Being part of as large an organization as Microsoft will finally give Skype a bit of room to really figure out their monetization play beyond what they've done so far.

Enterprise credibility – Skype has struggled for years to get any kind of real credibility within enterprises. Many have completely blocked Skype and many have no understanding of what it can do. Microsoft completely gets the enterprise… in some ways they own the enterprise… so this can only help Skype grow in business usage… and that's a GOOD thing for those of us who already use it that way.

Security – Whatever you want to say about Microsoft, they do understand how to communicate about security, something Skype is lacking. I can only hope that MS will now bring a higher level of communication to this aspect of Skype.

Synergy – I'm not a fan of that word… but it makes sense here. Think of the other products Microsoft makes… what if you could get Skype integration into Microsoft Office? what if Skype and Lync could play nice together to connect the whole Skype world to the enterprise UC offering of Lync? what about making Kinect work with Skype? There are a lot of cool things that could be done. (And, of course, we'll undoubtedly see Skype on Windows Phone 7, etc.)

I worry, of course, about the acquisition and what it will do to the tool I use so much. Those of us on NON-Microsoft platforms have complained for years about Skype's lack of attention to our Skype clients. The Mac OS X client has at least received more attention and near-parity with the Windows client (even though many may not be fans of the new UI)… while the Linux client has languished. In the new world of Microsoft, will those other platforms really receive much attention? (despite the requisite platitudes mouthed in the news conferences and stated in the news releases)

And how about the iPad client for Skype that has been rumored? Will that ever see the light of day?

Will Skype truly be able to function independently as a "disruptor of telecom" now that it is part of such a large corporation?

The answers remain to be seen over the next months as the deal moves toward closing. I have many friends who work at Skype and I do wish them all the best through this whole transition… I wish them well seeing how long they can hang on to their Mac laptops and iPhones ;-) ...

... and I wish them much ":-D” and hope they don't experience too much "(banghead)”.

Welcome to the new era of Skype!

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies - and on staff of Internet Society

]]>2011-05-10T08:58:00-08:00internetp2pvoipMicrosoft to Acquire Skypehttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20110510_microsoft_to_acquire_skype/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20110510_microsoft_to_acquire_skype/
In an press release today, Microsoft has made the official announcement for the purchase of Skype — one the most expensive acquisitions to date according to the company. From the press release:

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: "MSFT") and Skype Global S.à r.l today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake. The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both Microsoft and Skype.

... Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

]]>2011-05-10T08:16:00-08:00internetp2pvoipWhy Isn't Mobile Malware More Popular?http://www.circleid.com/posts/why_isnt_mobile_malware_more_popular/http://www.circleid.com/posts/why_isnt_mobile_malware_more_popular/
This is a followup to Wout de Natris' as usual excellent piece on the Enisa botnet report — pointing out the current state of mobile malware and asking some questions I started off answering in a comment but it grew to a length where I thought it'd be better off in its own post.

Going through previous iterations of Mikko's presentations on mobile malware is a fascinating exercise.

Mikko has been saying much the same thing for a long time — and he was (quite a few years back) seeing / predicting some dual purpose type viruses, mobile viruses that also had a PC virus that'd get dropped drop if a dongle got connected. [according to a presentation he did on a panel I was chairing]

The same thing in writeups by other AV vendors such as Kaspersky Labs — an old release they wrote in 2006 reads a lot like it could have been written today ... except for the amount of mobile malware which has shown a steady and worrying growth. Cross platform (phone to PC) malware like Cxover gets described in this one too.

The threat potential is far more scary on mobile platforms. Some because of the platform and some because of service provider issues.

On the phone — a key worry is the lack of control / vetting of apps. Some OS and phone vendors vet and sign apps before allowing them to run on a platform. However, for other mobile platforms, even more than for operating systems, you can get a variety of apps from all kinds of sources. Not all of them very well designed, so that the least they do is hang your phone, with the worst being to actively infect it, or at least leave it more vulnerable to infection than it was before.

Open access to phones, with features that allow unsolicited entry are the most worrying. For example, open bluetooth access, if enabled on a phone, means that apps (or malware) can jump to other phones within range. Such malware would travel rather slower than malware that propagates over the internet but…

Software can be sent to a mobile number so that opening a text message would trigger an attempted install. And everyone knows just how many users click "no" instead of "yes". Or should I have said "how few". Very few phones have AV and firewall programs installed so that the probability that any malicious app, once it makes it onto the device, will cause damage, is extremely high.

Service provider issues —

Mobile providers are usually from the Telco wing of various carriers, and they'd be bound by common carrier rules that the carrier's ISP division wouldn't be subject to. So — filtering content becomes a regulatorily much more dicey proposition.

Comparatively few wireless carriers are active in the security / malware conferences, so a lot of training / knowledge sharing / operational cooperation etc will be required before providers will be able to react appropriately to mobile malware threats on their network. To be sure, there are some major wireless carriers active in MAAWG, and efforts are made to reach out to conferences that wireless providers are more likely to attend, but… there is a lot to do, far more than there is in the ISP sector.

There're of course going to be far more such threats — but that wasn't why I started to write this post.

So, why isn't mobile malware spreading as rapidly as it should have, based on all our fears, predictions, readings of how precarious the security readiness of both mobile carriers and phone users is?

Maybe I'm way off base, but I would appreciate some comments on why mobile malware isn't spreading as fast as it should given the wide open nature of the platform and the lack of security, either on the device or on the network. I've a few thoughts on why this is the case… could be completely wrong of course.

My thoughts —

The fact that malware artists are still in what is seen as a testing phase (by the AV vendors, and as Wout's article points out) is indicative of, maybe one or likely several of these reasons.

1. Far less smartphones — just dumb phones that get used for voice and text messaging. Especially in less developed markets with very high mobile penetration — there'll be far more "basic phones" around rather than smartphones.

2. Far more PCs with a limited subset of platforms than there are smartphones, plus the smartphones have a much more diverse platform base so the opportunity cost of developing PC malware (and later, mac / linux malware) might be far more favorable to malware artists. Of course, with several new mobile platforms placing much more reliance on the browser — and as mobile versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera etc are widely popular, there's a readymade common vector for spammers to launch attacks that are browser specific rather than OS specific, so got to see how this trend changes things.

3. Cumbersome security measures for mobile transactions — people may or may not carry out too many financial / banking transactions online [but that's changing, and gradually increasing]. And while people do book tickets or carry out financial transactions online, but it might get more inconvenient to transact over a phone if this becomes a larger threat, perhaps more severe than in web based transactions. This may in fact discourage people from doing financial transactions on the Internet. For example the Indian banking regulator + central bank, RBI, recently mandated that all mobile txns must use an one time password that the credit card issuer provides when the customer texts them at a number / calls their helpdesk.

]]>2011-05-09T09:01:00-08:00internetaccess_providerscyberattackcybercrimecybersecuritymalwaremobile_internetp2pStudy Reports on Baseline of Global IPv6 Adoptionhttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20110420_study_reports_on_baseline_of_global_ipv6_adoption/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20110420_study_reports_on_baseline_of_global_ipv6_adoption/
A new research on native IPv6 traffic across six large providers in North America and Europe suggests despite fifteen years of IPv6 standards development, vendor releases and advocacy, only a small fraction of the Internet has adopted IPv6. "The slow rate of IPv6 adoption stems from equal parts of technical/design hurdles, lack of economic incentives and general dearth of IPv6 content," reports Arbor Networks.

Further findings from the study:

"… P2P continues to dominate at more than 60% of all IPv6 traffic. ... Unlike IPv4 P2P, the data suggests most IPv6 P2P application makes little effort to encrypt or use randomized ports. This IPv6 P2P behavior may correspond to the relative lack of IPv6 capable firewall and traffic management solutions. At a distant second and third, Web and SSH both average 4.6% of IPv6 traffic."

]]>2011-04-20T09:26:00-08:00internetaccess_providersip_addressingipv6networksp2pFed's Domain Name Crackdown Meets DNS Backlashhttp://www.circleid.com/posts/feds_domain_name_crackdown_meets_dns_backlash/http://www.circleid.com/posts/feds_domain_name_crackdown_meets_dns_backlash/
Kelly Jackson Higgins reporting in InformationWeek: "In the wake of federal crackdowns, such as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) mass seizure yesterday of 82 domain names of websites illegally selling and distributing counterfeit and copyrighted items, a group is building out a new point-to-point DNS system as a way for sites to dodge future domain takeovers by the feds. ... Meanwhile, the new Dot-P2P Project says its goal is to combat DNS-level censoring with a decentralized, Bit Torrent-powered system. 'By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP's DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted bittorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others,' the Dot-P2P Project page says."

]]>2010-12-05T10:28:00-08:00internetaccess_providerscybercrimecybersecuritydnsdomain_namesicannintellectual_propertyinternet_governancelawp2pnew_tldsPirate Bay Co-Founder Goes Public with Alternate P2P-Based DNS Projecthttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20101130_pirate_bay_cofounder_goes_public_with_alternate_p2p_based_dns/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20101130_pirate_bay_cofounder_goes_public_with_alternate_p2p_based_dns/
A group led by former Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is forming to develop a peer-to-peer-based alternative to today's ICANN-controlled DNS system, according to a blog posted on Tuesday. A tweet on Sunde's account dated Nov 28 said: "Alternative dns root is step 1. Step 2 is the new DNS system that is in the making. It's not advanced, it's p2p and more secure." The tweet generated a fair amount of interest according to Sunde and he has posted a follow up post on a blog called "P2P DNS" stating:

"We haven't organized yet, but trying to. The background for this project is that we want the internet to be uncensored! Having a centralised system thatcontrols our information flow is not acceptable.

By using existing technology for de-centralisation together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away. We're not going to re-invent the wheel, we're going to build on existing technology as much as possible.

]]>2010-11-30T12:30:00-08:00internetdnsicannp2pNetwork Neutrality is the Wrong Fight!http://www.circleid.com/posts/network_neutrality_is_the_wrong_fight/http://www.circleid.com/posts/network_neutrality_is_the_wrong_fight/
Winning would mean giving up much more important rights — historical rights that were in place in the US as recently as 1995 and remain in place in most of Europe even today.

We shouldn't settle for network neutrality. It's a poor substitute for what we had and much less than what we need. Let me explain. There are two topics to discuss. The first is "common carriage," a centuries old legal concept that applied to the US telecom industry throughout most of the 20th century. The second involves communications protocols. Both topics are complex, so I will cover only what's needed to understand why we shouldn't accept network neutrality and why, at a minimum, we should fight for enforcement of existing common carriage rules.

Network neutrality is about allowing any Internet application to run over an Internet connection, i.e. over a connection that uses Internet Protocol (IP). But under common carriage as it applied prior to the late 1990s, we had a more powerful right — the right to run any kind of network protocol, IP or otherwise, over a lower, simpler service which today we call a "bit stream*." Why does this matter? Because real innovation is also possible at these lower layers and that innovation continues to be important. But today, such lower layer innovation is restricted to inside one building or one campus. Yes, we can tunnel some lower level innovations over IP, but not all of them and only at a cost.

IP telephony (VoIP) is one place where problems arise. Most enterprises use IP PBXs internally, yet calls between enterprises use the PSTN. Many companies have attempted to address this gap, but progress is slow and expensive. Within an enterprise, IP telephony packets are given priority, but that priority is not supported on Internet access links and network neutrality doesn't help. As a result, to interconnect VoIP calls, enterprises must lease separate dedicated access circuits — circuits usually based on bit stream access — to support "SIP trunks." Up until the late 1990s, these circuits were regulated under common carriage. Today they are an unregulated monopoly, with prices derived from the cost of voice circuits 15-20 years ago, i.e. abnormally expensive for today.

Common carriage is the legal concept that, in exchange for government granted monopoly access to rights-of-way, the monopolist must carry anyone's traffic over the resulting infrastructure, at regulated rates. For centuries this has applied, to canals, to roads, to railroads, to telegraph lines and, until nearly the end of the 20th century, to telecommunications lines. But during the legal battles after the Telecom Act of 1996, the FCC basically gave up on common carriage.

If we accept Network Neutrality instead of common carriage, we guarantee future innovations happen only above the IP layer. Innovation at lower layers will be restricted to enterprise or campus applications. That's too bad as it was the existence of common carriage that allowed the Internet to develop in the first place. Do we want to eliminate that kind of innovation in the future?

If anything, we should be fighting to extend the ideas of common carriage to lower layers, e.g. dark fiber. Installing dark fiber is expensive and requires access to rights-of-way that are limited. The installed fiber is capital expensive infrastructure that lasts for decades. Such conditions justify granting monopoly access, in exchange for common carriage and regulated rates of return. But when you light up a dark fiber, you use (relatively) low cost gear with a short life (even if it can survive for ten years, Moore's Law renders it functionally obsolete within 2-3 years). What's more, there's rapid innovation in opto-electronics gear. Just look at the order of magnitude difference in cost between enterprise and carrier fiber-optic gear.

Today, the US is loosing leadership in all things Internet. Network Neutrality will just put a nail in our coffin. To stop our decline, fight for restoration of the common carriage principals that existed through most of the 20th century and still exist in law. To regain world leadership, fight to extent those principals to include access to dark fiber at regulated rates.

* Bit stream access. In the 20th century two regulated services provided what the 21st century calls bit stream access. These were voice telephony and T1 circuits. T1 circuits directly carry a stream of digital bits. Modems allowed voice connections to carry digital bits, for example, for bulletin board services and other purposes long before the Internet became popular.

]]>2010-08-24T10:32:00-08:00internetaccess_providersbroadbandnet_neutralityp2ppolicy_regulationtelecomvoipwirelessSkype Goes IPO - What Should Service Providers Do?http://www.circleid.com/posts/skype_goes_ipo_what_should_service_providers_do/http://www.circleid.com/posts/skype_goes_ipo_what_should_service_providers_do/
Last week's news about Skype's planned IPO brings a renewed focus on what constitutes a service provider these days, and perhaps more importantly, what forms the basis for its valuation? We all know how the advent of IP has turned the economics of telephony on its head, and the drivers of value continue to shift from the physical world of network infrastructure to the virtual world of software, the Web and now the cloud.

There's little doubt that Skype's continued growth has made them an attractive vehicle for investors. Having customers is key for any company's success, and having lots of customers raises the bar on what success could look like. Skype doesn't have everyone on the planet as a customer, but they're as close anyone is likely to get. According to their S-1 filing, the current user base is 560 million, and this has increased by 163 million from last year. Although "users" aren't true customers in terms of being paying subscriber or tied to contracts, anyone who can add this many in one year must be doing something right.

We all know that many "users" have multiple identities or aren't really active, so a subset of this is needed to get a more meaningful read on what Skype actually has. One metric would be "connected users", which averages out at 124 million per month. This is still a substantial community, although the majority is not using any paid services. In fact, the paid segment is a fraction of this, at 8.1 million.

While 8.1 million is a far cry from 560 million, Skype generated $406 million in revenues during the first half of 2010, and with this being a 25 percent bump from 2009, the company is on track to hit $1 billion in revenues next year.

In some ways, Skype has the best of both worlds. They are generating decent revenue from a small portion of their base with hardly any marketing expense. On the other hand, free is hard to beat, and they keep building a massive user base from which they keep trying to upsell. This is a very different model from conventional service providers who only offer paid services, and do not have a feeder pool of free "users" they can convert to paying subscribers. Of course, their operating expenses are much higher than Skype, and they could never survive on the relatively small ARPU that Skype generates from their calling services.

Skype hasn't yet become very profitable, and the thinking is by going public they'll have enough working capital to find new ways to increase ARPU, develop new revenue streams, and convert more free users to paid. Whether the $100 million they expect to raise will be enough is open to debate, but I see their IPO as being a strong validation for a new model and a different kind of service provider.

Of course I'm using the term "service provider" loosely, since Skype is Web-based and has little control over the last mile connection. Their technology is not as open as other operators, which limits their ability to interwork with other user communities and achieve a more universal federation to grow the user base. Furthermore, their ability to extend Skype beyond desktop telephony depends heavily on partnerships with other operators and vendors. Skype may have strong brand recognition, but little leverage when it comes to entering new markets from a position of strength.

Two such scenarios were noted in their IPO filing. One is their dependence on smartphone vendors — primarily Apple — to get Skype featured as a downloadable application. This can provide a broad entrée into the mobile VoIP market, but only to the point that the vendor feels it is worthwhile. There is no exclusivity here, and the vendors are free to offer other comparable services or even limit the features that Skype can provide.

The second scenario would be the partnerships Skype has developed with wireless carriers. Verizon is the most notable here, and again, there is a delicate balance that both parties must strike. Verizon will gladly support Skype so long as the relationship helps retain subscribers, drive network usage, and develop new sources of revenues. However, once Skype starts to cut into established revenues, they become more of a competitor, at which point the relationship can sour quickly.

As such, Skype does not hold all the cards, but neither does anyone else. With the right partnerships and market positioning, Skype has many paths to growth. Their user base is attractive to any operator, especially those seeking global coverage. Skype recognizes the challenges of growing in both the video market and the business market, both of which are large untapped opportunities. Video already accounts for 40 percent of their calls, but they have not yet been able to monetize this. The fact that they're considering subsidizing free video calls with advertising says a lot about how important this opportunity is to them. In the early days, this would never have been an option, but the stakes are higher now, and market forces may leave them little choice.

Skype certainly has an attractive product mix, and with such a large user base, their main challenge is mainly around market positioning and creating the right business models to capitalize on their strengths. This is a very different problem set from what conventional service providers must contend with, and whether Skype goes it alone or as a complement with other operators, their IPO should give them enough resources to get to the next level. Skype is certainly not going away, and as these pieces come together, they will start to look more and more like more like these operators. At that point, service providers will have some complex decisions to make, and depending on where Skype is having success, they may well end up working more as equal partners than being a minor add-on to stay competitive.

This article of mine originally ran on Friday in my Service Provider Views column on TMCnet.

]]>2010-08-23T08:11:00-08:00internetmobile_internetp2ptelecomvoipCanada: Smart Regulation, Not De-regulationhttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20100713_canada_smart_regulation_not_de_regulation/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20100713_canada_smart_regulation_not_de_regulation/
Canada's CRTC isn't as dumb as U.S. regulators who are considering ruling that the law doesn't apply where the telcos oppose it. (Title II deregulation) Canada just decided wireless needs to follow the rules. In turn, the CRTC intends to make sure the rules are reasonable. Rather than saying "never any rules," they instead try to write sensible ones.

They've required the carriers to clearly inform customers about throttling. That's under consideration in Britain and the U.S. as well, but probably in a meaningless fashion. The minimum disclosure should inform users about how many hours/month they are affected and how much users are slowed down, but the FCC is allowing telcos to say "sometimes we throttle" without the details needed to determine if it's negligible or abusive.

Comcast currently throttles far fewer than 1% of users and then only to a speed of 7 megabits faster than most DSL connections. They rarely do that for more than 15 minutes. If that were clearly disclosed, most of the criticism would disappear. But there is a problem if a carrier slows down, for example, Netflix streaming video. The current "complete information" doesn't let me distinguish. How often are users throttled? How much are they slowed down? Typical disclosure hides what we really need to know. Dale Hatfield, are you listening?

The minimal Comcast throttling is possible because they have essentially solved the p2p upstream congestion issue. Comcast top technical people have described how they've made inexpensive upgrades to 10-20 megabits from the 2 megabits of older systems. Explaining why they are moving slowly on DOCSIS 3.0 bonding, 4 CTO-level execs told Cable Show audiences they have essentially no upstream congestion these days. The speakers were in charge of several of the largest networks in the world. It's amazing how many in D.C., including just about all the cable lobbyists, don't seem to know the progress they've made.

]]>2010-07-13T11:29:00-08:00internetaccess_providersbroadbandp2ppolicy_regulationtelecomInternet Traffic Growth Rate Falling by Half in U.S. According to Cisco VNIhttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20100615_internet_traffic_growth_rate_falling_by_half_in_us_cisco_vni/http://www.circleid.com/posts/20100615_internet_traffic_growth_rate_falling_by_half_in_us_cisco_vni/
In 2014, Cisco estimates Internet traffic growth in the U.S. will be less than 18%, far less than most previous estimates. Worldwide, they measure the current rate at 42% and expect that to fall to 30% in four years. Actual numbers at Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) is the definitive source on Internet traffic today because they have direct relationships with carriers from China Telecom to AT&T. Their future estimates are the most carefully done publicly available.

Arielle Sumits of Cisco warns to be cautious with future predictions because "we try to be conservative in our estimates." One reason to consider is that China Telecom's estimates for growth the next few years are higher than Cisco's. NTT America's Mike Wheeler is seeing 70%+ growth rates currently. He's seeing exceptional demand from Latin America, where broadband is booming.

Sumits expects p2p growth to fall to 16% in some markets, corresponding to many reports over the last three years. AT&T actually had a quarter where p2p traffic fell in absolute terms, although that was an exception. People who download typically already have more than they can listen to for the remainder of their life. In the U.S. and Britain, most of the current popular shows are available to watch for free at Hulu and similar. It's easier to listen to a few commercials than go through the hassle of downloading.

Ironically, this drop in p2p growth is occurring when the actual speed of downloads has been going up dramatically. I did some tests on Bittorrent and was typically able to get 3 or 4 times the speed two years ago. On a ten meg Time Warner Cable connection, popular downloads came in at 2 meg to 8 meg most of the time. The typical hour long TV show, encoded at 700K (not great), took 10-20 minutes. Set it running overnight and 22 episodes of Lost are there in the morning.

Even 10-25% growth in bandwidth per user is still a great deal in absolute terms and will require thoughtful network planning.

More, including a chart with crucial data and highlights from Cisco's report on DSL Prime.